AP reports that Fox wouldn’t admit its error: “Fox executive vice president of news and editorial, was unapologetic. “We gave our viewers the news as it happened,” he said.” And AP offered advice from one who got it right by going just a tad slower:

ABC’s Terry Moran had less than a minute to look at the decision before he was talking on the air to anchor George Stephanopoulos and he briefly vamped for time, saying “I’m just taking a quick look at it.”

Describing the difficulty of the process in an interview, he said, “you have to be confident enough to say, ‘I don’t know.’”

In this case, Moran quickly spotted that Roberts had decided the case in agreement with the court’s liberal justices, a sign that it was highly unlikely the health care law had been overturned. ABC did bobble one fact initially, incorrectly saying the court’s decision was by a 6-3 vote instead of 5-4.

Moran said Thursday’s lesson to journalists should be “slow down.”

“I actually think the audience is much more interested in understanding than in seeing who finishes first in this case,” he said. “In this day and age, there are few true scoops. … On an event like this, take a breath.”

screenshot from TheExaminer.com January 7, 2009

We all – journalists and consumers – must learn from such historic errors. I will always remember Marquette basketball coach Al McGuire saying, “You have to learn from losing. Only a fool loses and doesn’t learn from it.” Let’s not forget this was not an isolated case. In 2003, I wrote – as did Chris Mooney and others – about live coverage by CNN, Fox and MSNBC of a press conference held by “a company linked to the UFO-obsessed Raelian sect (which) announced the birth of the world’s first cloned baby.”

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This story describes a small, ongoing study that touted lidocaine delivered to the back of the nasal cavity as an effective treatment for migraines. Although the story notes that the findings are preliminary, it does not inform us that the study wasn’t randomized or placebo-controlled; these are major drawbacks in interpreting the effectiveness of the procedure.

This story improves upon other recent Fox News efforts by including an independent expert perspective — the lack of which we commented on in a blog post about Fox News last week. But while our star score reflects that improvement, we still don’t think this story contributes very much to the public dialogue about health care. Our concerns are detailed in the review.

A study finds lower rates of gestational diabetes, but also more small babies, stillbirths, and newborn deaths in women who had bariatric surgery prior to their pregnancies compared with obese women who didn’t have surgery.